FOLLOWING THE GREAT LEADER

LETTER FROM NORTH KOREA about writer's visit to Kim Jong Il's North Korea. After the Japanese defeat in the Second World War, a new legend was attached to Mt. Paekdu. It was said that during the nineteen-thirties and forties, Kim Il Sung, the late Great Leader of North Korea, had established a secret base on its slopes, from which he staged a guerrilla war against the Japanese and liberated the nation. It was there, too, that the so-called Juche philosophy of absolute national self-reliance is said to have come to him. The fact is that he was nowhere near Mt. Paekdu then. He spent many of those years in Siberia, under the protective wing of the Soviet Army. But to insist on fact is to miss the point. What counts is the official myth. And the myth goes further. Not only did Mt. Paekdu become the sacred mountain of anti-Japanese resistance and revolution; it was also the birthplace of Kim Il Sung's son, Kim Jong Il, otherwise known as the Dear Leader. Now that the Great Leader is dead, his son's succession rests on the assumption of divine right. How can a dynastic succession be thus justified in a society supposedly based on scientific socialism? When a leader is held to be divine, his sudden death poses practical problems, for dying is the one thing he is not supposed to do. Everything possible will be done to preserve the Great Leader's body. Experts from Moscow's Center for Biological Structures have been hired to embalm him. They are said to be charging $300,000. Every railway station in North Korea displays twin portraits of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il, in which both look earnest and oddly ageless. Like the Tangun cult, the worship of Kim Il Sung is presented as not only a cultural but an ethnic phenomenon--something one is born into. Tells about the obligatory signs of grief and badges of Kim pinned to lapels. The Kim cult thrives on fear, ignorance, and isolation; it could not survive a real opening to the outside world.